Elephant In The Movie House
Andrew Klavan ·
Jun 7, 2010 at 8:10am
The LA Times has a story on summer box office this morning. It's weak, with both sequels like Sex and the City 2 and new wannabe franchises like Prince of Persia and Marmaduke under-performing. Market-specific pictures like Get Him to the Greek (teen boys) and Killers (ladies) are doing okay, but failing to break out. One big exception: the America-loving, free-market-defending, Boy-Scouts-of-America-saluting Iron Man 2, which has scored close to 300-million bucks so far and out-stripped the original in foreign markets. Why is that, I wonder? Whatever could be the reason? Life is such a mystery to the La Times.
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Re: Elephant In The Movie House
Drew, you and I have been in the movie business for years. It's never made sense to me, really, why they make it so hard on themselves. And in the summer!
They play such a conservative, risk-averse market-targeting game, and end up with lackluster performers like ...Greek and Killers.
They're movies, I want to shout. Make them fun. And cheerful. Why is that so hard?
Here's my theory: this all goes back to a few years ago, when people stopped calling it "show business" and started calling it "the entertainment industry."
"Show business" is old fashioned and a little grubby and honest. The "entertainment industry" sounds like a serious enterprise, with research guys and MBAs.
We need a little more "show business" and a lot less "entertainment industry" in our world.
Re: Elephant In The Movie House
Too true. But the thing is (this is my deduction from reading a book called Hollywood Economist by Edward Jay Epstein) the healthy, free market relationship between popularity and success has broken down in the movie biz. When 80 percent of the public went to a movie a week and the studios owned the theaters, you made a movie people liked, they came, you made money. Now, when only ten percent of the people go and the theaters take a big bite of the profits, you make your money in distribution deals, DVD sales, licensing and so on. Without the direct box office/profit relationship, the actual likes, dislikes and values of movie goers matter much less. Which is why TV - where you still need an audience to succeed - is so much better.
May '10
Re: Elephant In The Movie House
We got a call from Nielsen yesterday looking for someone in the house who had gone out to a movie palace in the last 6 months. Not one..... we watch Netflix on the big screen on weekends (video projectors are cheaper than flat screens if you know the market). I bet that she had to call a lot of houses that lacked 13 year old kids. But...
1) Wouldn't a marketing MBA take some market surveys, look at recent prior box office and notice that, you know, the public has no interest in paying to see 10 straight movies about how evil the US is, how we went to Iraq to steal all their oil, and brutalize innocent jihadists?
2) Even if the theatuh attendance is down, don't you need to have entertaining product to sell the DVDs?